Word: royero
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Women the world over may find a miracle brewing in a place called Uruka Amahuaja, a cluster of huts in the Venezuelan rain forest, reachable only by dugout canoe. Biologist Ramiro Royero has set up a computerized field office there to collect data on a plant still unknown to the outside world: a shrub whose poinsettia-like leaves are steeped as a medicinal tea by the Piaroa tribe to relieve menstrual cramps--without the caffeine jitters and other side effects caused by most of today's commercial remedies...
Maria Lopez, 59, a tribal matriarch, assesses Royero's work with the eye of a seasoned businesswoman--and for good reason. She knows that if the plant has commercial value, Venezuelan law may soon give the Piaroa rights for compensation from drug companies, which would have to recognize what the community calls its intellectual property. In years past, says Lopez, "we always gave up our medicines without any economic gain for ourselves. We won't make that mistake again...
...plants before the labs can muscle in. (None of the new laws are retroactive.) They also hope to make biocolonialism a key global trade issue at next month's meeting of the U.N.'s World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. "This isn't about charity for Indians," says Royero, head of Venezuela's nongovernmental Science Development Foundation. "These drug companies have long been doing business with someone else's 'inventions,' if you will...
Some countries, including Costa Rica and the Philippines, force companies to pay millions of dollars for the right to "bioprospect" in their jungles. Others have significantly restricted researchers' access: Mexico recently canceled a $2.5 million, U.S.-led drug-prospecting project when Maya Indians in Chiapas complained. But Royero and the Venezuelan government are on the movement's cutting edge: they are developing an unprecedented, classified database of plants and animals that have commercial potential as medicines and foods. Companies that see a scientifically verified, patented discovery advertised on the database would pay--through the central government, to the appropriate tribe...
What, if anything, the participants hash out in Geneva will be closely watched as far away as Aska Aja, another Piaroa village upriver from Uruka Amahuaja. There, Royero recently met with a shaman, Jacinto Martinez, 62, whose wife had died hours earlier from an operable eye tumor. The tribe had no access to a surgeon--nor money to pay one. For years, Martinez has helped scientists identify plants near Aska Aja that treat everything from skin rashes to diarrhea. What he would like in return, he says, waving away flies from his wife's wrapped corpse, is some...